On this day, July 7, 1970,Bede Callaghan, the Managing Director of the [Australian] Commonwealth Banking Corporation, said some really Roger Hallam-ite/Extinction Rebellionesque stuff
“On 7 July 1970, Mr Bede Callaghan, managing director of the Commonwealth Banking Corporation spoke on the ‘Perils and Pitfalls of the Seventies’ at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Adelaide.”
(Whitelock, 1971:29)
According to another book, Callaghan said the following:
“And so the sprawling city, the maimed country, and even the air we breathe and the sea that gives us life, combine into what can only be described as a coming nightmare unless we as a people are prepared to become violently Australia-conscious and to replan, decentralise, preserve,prohibit and police. We won’t correct the situation unless first as individuals and secondly as a nation we are prepared to think, to take care and to spend money.”
(Whittington, 1970:149)
https://livinghistories.newcastle.edu.au/nodes/view/55055
Why this matters.
This kind of rhetoric was not that unusual at the time (1970). We should remember that when we put faith in information-deficit models, and the Power of Exhortation…
What happened next?
By 1973 all this stuff was ancient history. It has come back periodically since then. So it goes.